Latin American countries are generally characterized as displaying high income and earnings inequality overall along with high inequality by gender, race, and ethnicity. However, the latter phenomenon is not a major contributor to the former phenomenon. Using household survey data from four...

Drawing on a compilation of data from household surveys representing 130 countries, many over a period of 25 years, this paper reviews the evidence on levels and recent trends in global poverty and income inequality. It documents the negative correlations between both poverty and inequality...

What part of the inequality observed in a particular country is due to unequal opportunities, rather than to differences in individual efforts or luck? This paper estimates a lower bound for the opportunity share of inequality in labor earnings, household income per capita and household...

The authors analyze general equilibrium relationships between trade policy and the household distribution of income, decomposing social welfare into real income level and variance components and emphasizing Gini and Atkinson indexes. They embed these inequality-adjusted social welfare functions...

This paper extends the Inequality Possibility Frontier approach in two methodological directions. It allows the social minimum to increase with the average income of a society, and it derives all the Inequality Possibility Frontier statistics for two other inequality measures besides the Gini....

There are several possible explanations for the observed changes in inequality, the returns to education, and the gap between the wages of informal and formal salaried workers in Argentina over the period 1980-2002. Largely due to the lack of evidence for competing explanations, skill-biased...

The authors propose a modification to the conventional approach of decomposing income inequality by population sub-groups. Specifically, they propose a measure that evaluates observed between-group inequality against a benchmark of maximum between-group inequality that can be attained when the...

Half of all undernourished women and children in South Asia are not found in the bottom 40 percent of wealth-poor households. This paper quantifies the extent to which this inequality in nutritional status arises within households versus between households. In contrast to previous literature, it...

Household income inequality has declined in Latin America in the past decades, contributing significantly to poverty reduction in the region. Although available evidence shows that changes in the labor income are among the main factors behind these inequality trends, few studies have analyzed...